Lawrence Ferlinghetti Biography

American writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919) is equally well
known for his own works and for his efforts on behalf of other
writers. Ferlinghetti's book of poems,
A Coney Island of the Mind
, is among the top-selling volumes in the history of American poetry,
with close to a million copies reportedly in print, and his durable
San Francisco bookstore, City Lights Books, was the intellectual home
of the Beat Generation movement in American literature and culture.

Though not as widely recognized as other writers among the
"Beats," such as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack
Kerouac, Ferlinghetti exerted enormous influence. The publishing arm of
his bookstore brought the works of the Beats before the public, and it was
Ferlinghetti who took up Ginsberg's cause when Ginsberg's
classic long poem "Howl" was deemed obscene and seized by
San Francisco authorities. Ferlinghetti's own poetry has not only
been read, but has been widely imitated. Many a college town coffee house
in the 1960s and beyond featured a beret-wearing poet who intoned free
verses that were often accompanied, by the rhythms of jazz music, and some
of the icons of hipster culture had their origins in his remarkably
fertile mind. Ferlinghetti outlived most of his contemporaries by decades,
and he continued to write voluminously and advocate vigorously for the
free-spirited attitudes he had helped bring to American literature.

Learned French Before English

Ferlinghetti, the youngest of five sons, was born Lawrence Monsanto
Ferling in Yonkers, New York, on March 24, 1919. His father, Charles, an
auctioneer, real estate agent, and something of an entrepreneur, had
shortened his Italian name upon arriving in the United States, and it was
not until 1954 that Ferlinghetti discovered the original form of his
family name and readopted it. He never knew his father, who died suddenly
six months before he was born. The death threw Ferlinghetti's
mother, Clemence, into a downward spiral, and she was eventually
institutionalized. Ferlinghetti bounced among relatives and orphanages
early in his childhood; Emily Monsanto, the wife of his uncle, Ludwig
Monsanto, took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, after separating from
her husband, and Ferlinghetti learned French as his first language. He
later learned to speak Italian fluently as well.

The family's fortunes fluctuated wildly after the pair returned to
New York. For a time they moved back in with Ludwig Monsanto, but funds
were short and Ferlinghetti suffered a period of malnutrition that
culminated in a diagnosis of rickets. Then Emily Monsanto got a job as a
governess with a well-off family named Bisland in Bronxville, New York.
Ferlinghetti chose to stay on with the Bislands when Emily later
disappeared. His literary education began under the influence of his
foster father, Presley Bisland, who had studied the classics of ancient
Greek and Latin literature, and it continued at the exclusive Mount Hermon
preparatory school in Massachusetts.

Ferlinghetti attended the University of North Carolina from 1937 until his
graduation in 1941, initially attracted there by the literary atmosphere
that flourished around the circle of novelist Thomas Wolfe. He joined the
staff of the
Daily Tar Heel
newspaper while he was there. In the fall of 1941, with German submarines
harassing American ships, Ferlinghetti joined the U.S. Navy. He served
through most of World War II, commanding a patrol boat during the D-Day
invasion of France on June 6, 1944.

The boat was good-sized, and Ferlinghetti took advantage of the chance to
requisition reading materials for himself and his shipmates. "We
could order anything a
battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library [an
inexpensive set of volumes of classic literature]," he recalled to
Nicholas Wroe of England's
Guardian
newspaper. "We had all the classics stacked everywhere all over
the ship, including the john." After leaving the Navy, Ferlinghetti
used his proceeds from the G.I. Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment
Act) to further his literary education. He completed a master's
degree at Columbia University in New York in 1947 and then enrolled at the
Sorbonne, a venerable university in Paris. He received his doctoral degree
in 1949, writing his dissertation, about images of cities in modern
poetry, in French.

Moved to San Francisco

As a budding writer sitting in Parisian cafés, Ferlinghetti was
influenced by two of the giants of modern poetry, the expatriate American
writers T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Finally convinced that he was merely
imitating them rather than developing his own voice, he banished their
works from his home and began looking for new models. He found one in the
anarchist-minded critic and essayist Kenneth Rexroth, whom he met in Paris
and encountered again in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti landed in that city
in 1951 after a cross-country train trip, and found that he loved its
European atmosphere. He was soon joined there by his fiancée,
Selden Kirby-Smith, known as Kirby, and the two were married. The marriage
lasted until 1976 and produced two children, Julie and Lorenzo.

Ferlinghetti and other young writers attended Rexroth's lectures
and listened to his programs on Berkeley's KPFA, the first
noncommercial radio station in the United States. Ferlinghetti supported
himself with teaching and freelance writing jobs while working on
translations of the poems of French writer Jacques Prévert. A new
literary scene began to grow in San Francisco, with Rexroth as its
godfather, containing a political tinge strongly opposed to the dominant
conservatism of 1950s America. Ferlinghetti was drawn to the heavily
Italian-American North Beach neighborhood, and in 1953 he and a business
partner, Peter D. Martin, launched a poetry magazine there, naming it
City Lights
after the 1930 silent film by screen comedian Charlie Chaplin.

To support the magazine, the two soon opened a small bookstore called the
City Lights Pocket Bookshop. The name was later shortened to City Lights
Books, but the original name was significant: Ferlinghetti's store
was said to be the first in the United States dedicated exclusively to the
new paperback book medium. City Lights was an immediate hit among San
Francisco's resident writers and intellectuals, and it soon became
a pilgrimage goal for all kinds of young people who came to the city to
experience its wide-open cultural environment. In 1955 Ferlinghetti built
on the bookstore's success by launching a publishing operation,
City Lights Pocket Poets.

The first volume he issued was a book of his own poems,
Pictures of the Gone World
. But it was another early City Lights product that led to the most famous
episode in Ferlinghetti's literary life. In 1955 he heard Allen
Ginsberg read his epic poem "Howl," a furious, overwhelming
work, frankly sexual in parts, that exposed a vast dark underside of
America's sunny culture. Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram
(according to Ferlinghetti biographer Barry Silesky) that read, "I
greet you at the beginning of a great career," echoing the words of
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson to poet Walt Whitman a century before. He
added a question: "When do I get the manuscript?"
Ginsberg's
Howl and Other Poems
sold out quickly, and Ferlinghetti put in an order for a new run with a
British printing firm.

The shipment was seized by U.S. Customs on obscenity charges, but then
cleared for import. When Ferlinghetti put the book on sale again at City
Lights, he was arrested by San Francisco police and charged with printing
and selling lewd and indecent material. Ferlinghetti was defended by the
American Civil Liberties Union, which put numerous literary figures on the
stand to testify in favor of the value of Ginsberg's work, and in
October of 1957 he was completely exonerated. Publicity surrounding the
trial benefited not only Ginsberg but also Ferlinghetti's entire
operation. City Lights Books became firmly ensconced as a center of
experimental writing and of the growing counterculture of the San
Francisco area.

Published Best-Selling Book of Poems

The "Howl" trial also brought attention to
Ferlinghetti's own writing, and in 1958 his poetry collection
A Coney Island of the Mind
was published by New Directions Press in New York. He would go on to
write more than 50 other books of poetry and fiction, but
A Coney Island of the Mind
remained his best-known work and one of the most popular volumes of
poetry in the American literary canon. Ferlinghetti favored the free,
unrhymed verse of his predecessors Eliot and Pound, but in place of the
dense web of literary references found in their poems he created an
imaginative carnival of images that were often humorous.
"Dog" was one of the poems that endeared
Ferlinghetti's writings to ordinary poetry readers. The poet traced
the wanderings of a dog across San Francisco, noting that
"Congressman Doyle" (of the notorious U.S. House Un-American
Activities Committee) "is just another / fire hydrant / to
him," and he characterized the dog as "a real realist / with
a real tale to tell / and a real tail to tell it with."

Ferlinghetti later followed up
A Coney Island of the Mind
with a sequel,
A Far Rockaway of the Heart
(both titles refer to locations in New York City); it was one of numerous
books of poetry that covered nearly every conceivable topic, from politics
to music, the killing of President John F. Kennedy (in
"Assassination Raga"), sex, and personal experience. He also
translated the works of European poets, including Italian film director
Pier Paolo Pasolini, and spent several years in Italy. He wrote two novels
(
Her
and
Love in the Days of Rage
), travel narratives, and several plays. Ferlinghetti rarely adopted the
stance of intense alienation that was integral to the approach of most of
the Beat poets, and he rejected attempts to classify him with the group,
although he applauded their efforts. "In some ways what I really
did was mind the store," he told Wroe. "When I arrived in
San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If
anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the
Beats."

Indeed, Ferlinghetti's bookstore continued to prosper as San
Francisco became something of a living monument to the American
counterculture, and he gradually evolved into an institution in the city.
A variety of younger writers, including poet Diane di Prima, had their
careers helped along by City Lights Press, and Ferlinghetti's own
poetry was collected in
These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955–1993
. In 1998 he was named San Francisco's first poet laureate, and in
the early 2000s he wrote a column for the
San Francisco Chronicle
newspaper.

Among the various honors that came his way in later years was the
inaugural Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, recognizing
outstanding service to the American literary community, in 2005. By that
time Ferlinghetti was entering the last half of his ninth decade, but his
pace had not slowed in the least; he published the first volume of a new
epic-length poem,
Americus I
, in 2004, and he seemed to revel in his role as a still-active part of
American literary history.